Momus - Pillycock

2017 release from the eccentric Scottish singer/songwriter. Momus - indie veteran, Japan-dwelling Scot, David Bowie impersonator, unreliable tour guide, novelist - makes a record every year. Each release becomes a sort of barometer of the cultural and emotional weather around him, filtered through his own preoccupations. 2017's release is called Pillycock and features a strong influence from Pasolini's Trilogy of Life films (the Arabian Nights, the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales), from the rich Elizabethan language of pamphleteer Thomas Nashe, from Jacobean revenge tragedy, from Fellini, psychedelia, snippets of guerilla music foregrounded by artists like Wael Shawky and Kader Attia, early hip-hop, and the skirl and thump of Japan's exuberant summer festivals. What on earth could these brightly-colored strands have in common, and what's Momus up to when he weaves them together - with deliberate inauthenticity and anachronism - over modal electronic folk music using an Arabic scale called Bayati? Perhaps it's their common distance from milquetoast modern Western culture which makes these themes so oddly appealing; invoking the power of imagination and our constant desire for the new, the dark and the strange, this "art of distances" helps us transform and refresh a world which, up close, gets sick, sweet, repetitious or rotten.